7. Hai sa facem vin! (Let’s make wine!)
Moldovans are pretty proud of their wine making tradition, and is still an activity many rural families will take part in. For my American audience, I want to clear one thing up. This is not your sophisticated glass bottle of wine requiring a corkscrew. This is your homemade, filled in 3-year-old plastic water bottles and sold on the streets kinda wine. So this post, I want to run through the wine making process. This will be a quick and dirty version, and one in which I would not advise anyone to attempt to replicate because I doubt it will be met with success. I just want to give idea of what Moldovan wine making is all about.
Step 1: Pick the grapes.
Pretty self-explanatory. Many Moldovans, my host family included, grow their own grapes. This stage consists of heading out to the fields and twisting the clusters of grapes of the vine and putting them into big, coarse white sacks, and than loading those sacks into a van or on the back of a tractor to take back. Pretty basic manual labor, though with the advantage of being able to eat while you pick. Anymore than 2 hours of this though, and it becomes numbingly boring. After days and days of picking grapes and bringing them back at nightfall, all the grapes are finally collected. Now what?
Step 2: Next, you need to crush all of the grapes up and throw them into giant, open-topped wooden barrels. Depending on the size of the batches there are different ways to crush up all the grapes. Most do it with a metal grinder type contraption, but if you had a really small batch you could potential do it by walking on the grapes in a barrel as is often quaintly depicted. While this is going on….
Step 2.5 Cleaning out the barrels
We have 8 wooden barrels holding about 300L each down in our beci (basement or cellar). 4 for white and 4 for red. While this is going on we roll them up from the beci and my host dad cleans them out. These are massive wooden barrels, so often we roll them onto two sturdy ropes and use a type of pully system to roll them up and down the steps. My host dad then disinfects the barrels with some method that I am not privy too.
Step 3: Fermentation
The grapes then sit in these huge open air barrels and are let to ferment. For my host family, they left it to ferment for 5-7 days. The mass expands as it is fermenting so they have a big wooden prong stick they occasional use to press the bubbling matter back down. By this time, it does not look nor really smell all that appetizing. There are usually a thousand little fruit flies buzzing all over the place, and you really don’t want to mess with it.
Step 5: the final squeeze
From the fermentation phase, the crushed up mixture(still including stems, seeds, skin, etc.) gets placed into a cylindrical wooden barrel that opens on hinges into two semi circles. At the base is a metal piece with a faucet and a metal pole running out of the middle that runs up to the top where a crank is attached. One fills this barrel with the fermented mixture, and turns the crank to put downward pressure on the mixture. Out of the faucet drips sweet new wine (often called must, which is literally a mix between grape juice and wine). This is siphoned out of large bowls down a long black tube into the freshly cleaned out barrels in the cellar.
And thus, you have the footnotes version of making wine. The pictures below will help you visualize the process much better than my rushed, 5th grade descriptive abilities.
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